The present invention relates to the field of digital media storage and navigation and, more particularly, to adapting the bitrate of media based on user interest as determined by biometric feedback.
Currently, media storage and navigation is performed based on conventions such as multimedia device configuration settings and/or traditional organizational schemes such as hierarchical directory structures. These current methods for handling media often do not reflect a user's interest and needs. Presently, media is treated with the same level of importance and the user must manually determine which media or portions of media are relevant and important. Multimedia devices such as camcorders, MP3 players, and digital video recorders attempt to compensate for this shortcoming by offering a few means to store and navigate media based on user's interest. These mechanisms such as playlists and bookmarks, however, must be manually organized and are tedious for users to maintain. Further, as user's preferences/tastes change these mechanisms, which are static, quickly become outdated, limited, and confining.
Media navigation also suffers from the similar problem of being arbitrarily determined and not aligned with user's specific interest. For example, movie digital video disc (DVD) menus offer users the ability to select scenes which are statically created by the movie creators. Many times these pre-determined scenes do not reflect the user's favorite scenes. As such, users must manually navigate to favorite sections of a movie when their favorite sections do not correspond to the movie creator's selected scenes. This manual navigation can be time consuming and potentially fruitless when users forget the location of a favored section. What is needed is a means for storing and navigating media which is directed at user's interest.